The Rusty Hook Bait & Tackle Shop wasn’t far from the causeway. It was an oversize hut with an old, cracked oar hung over the doorway. Inside, antique corks and bobbers hung from blue-painted rafters. Tim was at the register bagging up someone’s purchase, so I went down one of the two aisles, pretending to browse. I knew a lot more about fishing than I did about boats—I had to; as a kid, it kept us fed—but I didn’t want to spend more than necessary to get Tim talking. The extra work Roy had set me up with was a big help, but not that big.
When the customer left, I got a Super Sally lure and headed up to the register.
Tim looked up as I approached. I said, “Oh, hey.”
“Hey there, Mr. Lawyer.”
“Oh, I’m just Leland when I’m not wearing a tie.”
“Didn’t know you was a fishing man.”
“Thought I’d take my son out, see what we can get. I’m hoping for some largemouth bass.” I tossed the lure on the counter.
“Uh-huh,” he said, ringing it up. “These Super Sallies, them bass just jump right on ’em. But you know,” he said, tapping the blue-and-black skirt of my lure with his fingertip, “I’ve had better luck with the chartreuse than with this color.”
“That so?”
“Mm-hmm. Much better. Round here, it’s just what they seem to like.”
“Well, thank you. I’ll be right back.”
I took the lure to the shelf where I’d found it and swapped it for a chartreuse one. Handing it to Tim along with a ten-dollar bill, I said, “I could’ve used one of these when I was a kid. We would’ve eaten a damn sight better, I’m sure.”
He nodded. “We was the same way,” he said. “Three of us used to fish together—me, Pat, and Karl—and when our uncle took us out with the, you know, the original one of these, the smaller one, I swear, we thought it was magic.”
He sighed at the memory.
I said, “I sure am sorry about your brother.”
“Yeah, well.” He shrugged and handed me my change. After a second’s pause, staring at the counter or maybe the floor beyond, he said, “You know, that did make sense, what you said back in court. About Jackson saving his daddy’s life. He could’ve just let him choke.”
“Yeah, he could’ve.”
He looked me in the eye and said, “So, I just don’t know.”
I nodded to say I understood.
“Thing is, though,” he said, “who else could it be? And why?”
“Well, that’s what I’m trying to figure out.”
He put my lure in a plastic bag, shaking his head at the puzzle. “It’s just, I ain’t never seen nobody but Jackson get that mad at him. Apart from Mazie, and I mean, she’s so little she couldn’t kill a dang cat, much less Karl.”
“Yep,” I said. “You know, one thing I’m trying to find out, which might help figure all of this out, is where he came up with the money for that Mustang.”
He chuckled and shook his head. “Naw, he didn’t need none. He straight-up won that car in a card game.”
“Did he?” I figured Karl had told his brothers that story so they wouldn’t know about the money he had. “Dang, what kind of high rollers was he playing cards with?”
“Don’t rightly know,” he said. “I never went myself. He went most every month, up in Charleston, and most always came back flush. He was a hell of a poker player. I don’t think I ever beat him once in my life.”
“Well, ain’t that interesting. You know, anything else you might happen to remember about those card games, if you could let me know, it’d be much appreciated.”
“You could ask Pat,” he said. “He went with him at least once that I recall.”
“Well, thank you much,” I said, picking up the bag with the lure. “I’ll do that.”
“Go down the Broke Spoke,” he said. “He’s there three, four nights a week, I’d say.”
21
Thursday, August 15, Afternoon
It was yet another glorious, sunny day. I’d driven down to the beach to get a paper cone of fried shrimp for lunch. I wondered sometimes if living in this perfection of ocean breezes, seafood, and endless summer days made people a little crazy. We were living in Eden, but instead of enjoying it, some folks were running around whacking people in the head with crowbars, abusing their own families, and, according to Jackson, trying to frame teenage boys for vicious murders. And on top of that, as I’d learned from the Blue Seas work I was doing for Roy, our eminent councilman Henry Carrell was playing some kind of barely legal shell game with offshore subsidiaries, all in the name of squeezing a few more dollars out of his already-lucrative company. It seemed like most every trouble that existed in the world was right here too, quietly poisoning our idyllic-looking seaside town.
What I hadn’t learned yet was any more about Karl’s monthly poker games in Charleston. I’d cruised past the Broke Spoke a few times, looking for Pat’s battered pickup in the parking lot, but hadn’t seen it. I could’ve gone back to the trailer park and looked for him there, but I thought I’d get more out of him if I could catch him half drunk at the strip club.
Here on the beach, the ice cream stand was doing great business. Even though it was a weekday afternoon, the line was almost twenty people long. Once Jackson’s jaw was healed enough for him to talk again, I was going to need to badger him a little more about the arson. If he’d cop to it, I could narrow that night’s timeline and maybe create reasonable doubt about whether he’d even had time to commit the
